Executive summary

Marketing options for non-profit organizations have increased with time. Besides using traditional methods like print and direct marketing, your non-profit can use email marketing, social media, banner ads, mobile marketing, and many more. 

Your target audience also has access to different channels and can reach you on either with ease. Or, at least, they should be able to do so. Seventy-eight percent of consumers switch between channels when searching, comparing, and purchasing. Running campaigns on a single channel can no longer deliver the best results.

Adopting integration solutions for your non-profit organizations offers you better reach. It also allows you to craft messages depending on the target audience and the channel they are most likely to be found. 

An integrated marketing strategy is a difference between having a purpose in your marketing strategy and hoping luck will strike twice.

An effective strategy outlines your message clearly, provides donors and supporters with your unique selling point, addresses the right target market, and tailors messages to the audience through the right channel.

The messaging is consistent across all channels, but delivery is different. Eighty-six percent of professionals believe that integrated marketing leads to success.

This white paper explores integrated marketing strategies for non-profit organizations and how you can implement them to ensure success.

It also looks at how you can deliver the right message to the right donor or sponsor, at the right time, via the right channel, and assist them in decision making while creating awareness for their organization.

It will also focus on how you can combine multiple marketing channels to achieve effective and efficient digital campaigns.

Introduction

Consider the various ways people interact with your non-profit. It is most likely through community events, social media, website, brick and mortar office, emails, or others.

There are also various ways people show support for your non-profit – subscribing to your newsletter is one of them. Facebook fans, recurring donors, one-time donors, and peer fundraisers are some of the things that typically rank high on any non-profit organization’s metrics list.

But they can’t all be put in the same category.

These donors offer to support your non-profit for various reasons. They, therefore, need to be treated differently. Integration solutions for non-profit organizations make this possible. 

Integrated marketing helps you treat donors as individuals by considering what channel they use to interact with your non-profit organization, how they interact with it, and whether their support can continue and also increase in the process. 

It gives your donors and supporters a seamless experience through the integration of all your marketing efforts. The different marketing efforts work together instead of acting individually to achieve your goals and get your supporters and donors where you want them.

Integrated marketing also helps you connect all your communication channels and manage them in one place. It lets you create a bridge that connects data from all your channels and ensures consistency in communication across all these channels.

When your communication uses a similar tone across channels, it can easily be recognized and associated with your non-profit by your donors and supporters. It allows you to focus on all your programs through an omnichannel effort. This coordination leads to higher retention rates and an increase in income.

Consider this example: your non-profit uses different channels of communication. You have a staff member who handles direct mail, one who creates adverts for print and TV, another who plans events, and a different one who handles social media.

Let’s say you are planning a gala event. This means that each of these staff members must come up with messaging content and send it out to your donors and sponsors. 

Your teams can’t keep up with everything their colleagues are doing. Plus, they might be competing with each other.

As a consequence, your campaigns will use different messaging. Some of your potential donors might be omitted. Others might receive similar messages several times and get frustrated.

Integrated marketing gets all staff members working together towards a common goal. They all have access to the same platform and can easily see what other teams are promoting and to whom. 

It also ensures that they collaborate when creating messaging for events, fundraising activities, and marketing. Integrated marketing breeds a sense of cohesion, collaboration, and consistency. The team remains on the same page throughout their marketing efforts.  

More importantly, your supporters aren’t omitted, nor bombarded with messages about the same event.

Everybody wins.

Steps To A Successful Integrated Marketing Strategy For Non-Profit Organizations

1. Understand Your Audience

The first step towards identifying your target audience is determining your organization’s goal. What is your non-profit trying to achieve right now? How much money do you need to raise? What is the objective of the campaign? 

These goals may change from time to time depending on your niche, but they help you focus on the people who matter the most. /

You cannot appeal to everyone. If you try to target everyone, you will end up reaching no one. Instead, locate your audience and define those you want to get support from.

It then becomes much easier to connect with them meaningfully and make the most of your fundraising efforts. 

Next, segment your target audience using a CRM. This helps you divide your audience into different groups. Separating your contacts by lists and tags allows you to send relevant marketing messages to the right groups easily.

Research shows that 64 percent of non-profits segment their communications. This means that they can send personalized correspondences during fundraising.

Define your audience’s needs and prioritize them, depending on your goals. Your audience should include supporters, donors, and end consumers. When you have these audiences defined, it becomes easy to also tailor specific parts of your website to each of them.

You don’t want your audience spending too much time trying to find what they want on your website. Make it easy for them, and you will definitely see your bounce rate reduce significantly.

To determine your audience, you need to do some research. Get started by considering these handy tactics that can help you to determine your audience:

• Use Facebook and Google Analytics to analyze visitors to your site. What pages did they visit? Which posts did they like or share? What programs appeal to them?
• Use a donor survey or hold interviews with donors to know what they consider important, why they donate to your organization, and what channels they prefer for communication.
• Hire a market research professional.
• Provide polls to past and present members.
• Talk to or call volunteers and donors.

Once you have determined the right audience, segment them using demographics (sex, age, nationality, education) and psychographics (values, habits, hobbies). The information you gather will ensure you are not guessing when creating experiences for your target audience. 

Build an audience persona – a fictionalized version of your primary target audience. Doing this allows you to tailor marketing efforts, centralize, and organize your content strategy. It also allows you to adjust your messaging and website design.

Remember that the persona changes with each shift in goal. You, therefore, need to readjust them each time your goals change. 

Your target audience will shape what you say, where you say it, and how you do it. An audience persona allows you to outline the target audience and refine your marketing strategy.

Having a refined marketing strategy ensures good customer experiences, leading to increased revenue. Sixty-five percent of audiences find a positive experience more influential than great advertising.

2. Identify and Understand Your Communication Channels

A huge part of successful integrated marketing is cross-promotion which requires a thorough understanding of communication channels. It requires constant communication with the target audience, both offline and online. 

As a non-profit organization, your primary communication channels will be a mix of email, direct mail, website, blog, social media, print marketing, PR/media relations, brick & mortar office, and in-person events. 

Consider the strengths and weaknesses of each channel and how it will help you reach your target audience. Concentrate on channels that will be more effective and profitable. If your audience is not on Twitter, then simply don’t use it. Instead, select channels that will ensure greater success. 

Use analytics tools to check up on your campaigns and how they are performing. Non-profit reporting apps can help you to determine what channel is working better and understand how and why one of them is not working. These reports then help you recalibrate your campaigns to ensure effectiveness. 

3. Generate Consistent and Compelling Content

Ensure that communication on all your channels is clear, compelling, and consistent. Make sure that your messaging aligns with the attitudes and behavior of your target audience. 

An effective integrated campaign will span through different customer touchpoints. It will help you deliver customized and consistent messaging to your donors and sponsors. 

When reaching the target audience through different channels, it’s imperative to have a consistent brand identity in terms of logo, photos, graphics, and colors. Brand consistency leads to a 23 percent increase in revenue.

It determines the brand’s revenue since it affects how the organization generates leads and nurtures them, and communicates with customers. Research shows that color alone increases brand recognition by 80 percent!

Consistency ensures that your audience becomes accustomed to your voice and that they can identify key messages. They understand what your organization is about, what your goals are, and why they should support your cause.

Once you have generated compelling content, think of ways to use it across your different channels, including social media posts, email campaigns, blog posts, infographics, video, and so many more.

Check that every piece of content you develop can be repurposed to suit different channels. For example, you can use an infographic as different posts on your Twitter or Facebook pages.

Repurposing allows you to maximize the use of the content you create, leading to increased reach and enhanced brand awareness. 

Your message should also be set up to drive traffic to your target channel. Create backlinks using your best performing online content to drive traffic to your desired channels. You can link to your website or your social media profiles, depending on your campaign goal.

Include links to your different channels so that the target audience can connect easily with your brand and spread the word. For example, your website should have links to your social media channels. 

For effective integrated marketing, ensure the usernames and URLs are similar. For example, if your non-profit is called Save the Fish, then you can use @SavetheFish and SavetheFish.com. Your campaigns should also use the same phrases and keywords. 

Your content should help you stand out from the competition. Be different by ensuring the content you generate is interesting and engages your target audience. 

4. Come Up with a Communication Plan

Once you have determined your channel, messaging, and audience, develop a plan to help you execute the marketing tactics that appeal best to your target audience. 

For example, if you’re targeting baby boomers, consider Facebook, fundraising events, or direct mail. If you’re targeting millennials, consider Instagram or text.

It’s also important to choose the type of content that will have the most impact. Use the best CRM for non-profit organizations to determine how often your target audience wants to receive messages. 

Some of the non-profit CRM features include letting you know how often your audience visits your website, reads emails, and engages with you on your social media channels.

This information will help you send content frequently enough without overwhelming your donors or sponsors. One of the benefits of using CRM for your non-profit is that you get the insights you need to help you make decisions based on your audience’s needs.

5. Understand Your Audience’s Decision-Making Process

A donor journey map describes the donor’s experience by identifying interactions with your program, their goals, emotions, and expectations. The journey describes what happens from awareness to consideration, research, and intent. 

The donor journey defines what a donor goes through and assists you in visualizing their point of view so that you can optimize their experience. Cohort3 describes the donor journey in six layers.

The audience layer represents your audience persona. The giving stages describe the donor experience during the donation process. They depend a lot on context, so be extra careful with them.

According to Cohort3, doing the research before mapping out the sequence is extremely important. Audiences are unique, and some can accelerate from one stage to the next, while others can skip or loopback. 

The donor journey map will help you:

• Understand the donor experience across all touchpoints.
• Align your teams so that they understand the donor’s point of view, leading to an optimized collaborative experience.
• Map fundraising data, technology, and internal processes so that the donor stays connected to the experience.
• Identify and prioritize opportunities that improve donor experience and drive more value.
• Listen and measure performance throughout donor touchpoints and stages.
• Visualize the future to improve the designs and optimize future fundraising experiences. 

During the donor journey, ensure you can guide the donors or sponsors along the stages seamlessly. For example, if their entry point was Facebook or Twitter, usher them through the stages based on their entry point until they donate. After the donation, continue your messaging to make them recurring donors. 

Integrated marketing makes this simple since you can move the donor through each stage, even if they change channels. You can even automate the process so that it seamlessly guides the donor through the stages.

6. Be Logical

A successful campaign needs logic. Make sure that everything in the campaign makes sense and that it leads towards achieving a certain goal. 

Think about the channels you will use and the messaging. Align the right audience to the right platform to ensure you meet your objectives. 

It’s also important to ensure that the different teams working on the campaigns collaborate. The teams should be reading from the same scripts, with each member aware of the campaign objectives.

Regular meetings will ensure that the campaign runs smoothly. You understand what’s working, what’s not, and discuss solutions to ensure the campaign remains on course. 

Once implemented, an integrated marketing strategy will help you find your target audience, find relevant channels, and craft compelling content that is engaging and interesting for your audience to act.

According to research, 72 percent of customers expect and appreciate an integrated marketing approach.

7. Track and Adjust

Keep monitoring your audience’s needs to ensure the strategy is comprehensive and result-driven. Ensure you produce engaging content that intrigues and encourages them to donate or fund your program. 

An integrated effort will require analytics to show if you are getting the desired results or not. 

Integration Solutions for Non-Profit Organizations

Non-profit organizations now have access to technologies that enable them to manage everything, from how they handle finance and operations to how they interact and connect with their audience.

There are many options available for non-profit organizations, from the most basic CRMs to platforms designed specifically for them. Cloud solutions have become important for non-profits since they cut administrative costs and help them operate more efficiently.  

Research shows that 63 percent of non-profits use operational software to track data, report, and measure performance. It’s an easy way to help your supporters begin and continue with the donor journey.

It gets hard, once the non-profit begins to grow, to nurture every lead. With technology, it becomes easier. 

For example, with marketing automation software, you can map out a supporter’s journey using their email addresses and guide them through it with little or no human intervention. 

According to research, cloud services have become essential with 75 percent of those in the survey, indicating they use them for at least three purposes, including data storage, donor and event management, and document storage.

When questioned about the benefits, most named ease of access in terms of collaboration, mobility, remote access, and regional issues at 40 percent. They also mentioned improved performance in terms of flexibility, speed, consistency, reliability, efficiency, security, and support. 

Most non-profit organizations use cloud technology like Salesforce, Dynamics 365, Mailchimp, Eventbrite, and so many more. It allows them to have targeted products for their donors, fundraising, and pledge management. 

These solutions help your non-profit handle activities like:

• Event management
• Marketing campaigns aimed at motivating donors, creating brand awareness and increasing reach
• Nurturing leads and keeping track of them
• Sending thank-you notes
• Refining the donor lists for every campaign goal

However, while most of these solutions are great in their space, it becomes hard to leverage their maximum value. Some of the reasons for this include:

• High administrative costs: with all the different solutions to handle operations, you will need more staff and time to copy data manually from one to the other. 
• Poor donor experiences: today’s audience is all about the experience. 67 percent of them churn due to bad experiences. Of this, 1 out of 26 will complain, while 91 percent of the unhappy audiences will leave without even saying goodbye. However, if you integrate email marketing software like Mailchimp to your CRM, you can avoid sending the wrong messages to audiences and determining them to rage quit.
• Lack of proper software utilization: all your solutions will provide you with good data, but do you have real-time visibility? According to research, most non-profits (90 percent) are collecting data, but they often don’t know what to do with it.
• The study showed that only 40 percent of non-profits used data to make decisions, while 46 percent didn’t. Forty-nine percent didn’t know how the organization collected data. If you don’t know how data is collected, chances are that you won’t use it to make decisions. Only 5 percent used data to make every decision, while 13 percent said they rarely used data (some not at all).

You can avoid all this hassle. In fact, you can be one of those few non-profits who leverage the power of data and thus meet all your goals.

How do you ask?

By integrating your industry software. The right integration solutions for non-profits allow your organization to work smart, not hard. You choose the best solutions for functions you need met from different vendors and make them work together seamlessly as an integrated suite. SyncApps by Cazoomi is an integration platform built for this particular purpose. 

For example, when fundraising or trying to grow an email list, you can use the Salesforce CRM, Mailchimp to send emails and Eventbrite for event surveys.

An integration solution like SyncApps by Cazoomi will help you add the right contacts from Salesforce to your Mailchimp list or send them surveys.

Data from the survey will help you better target donors with personalized messaging on Mailchimp. The integration will help you communicate better with donors and provide them with great experiences. 

Conclusion

Integration solutions for non-profit organizations increase efficiency. They reduce employee workload, provide accurate data at the right time, and lead to better decision making. They will help your non-profit organization grow and reach/help more people easily.

It helps you understand your donors and supporters better. You have access to data on their behavior at each touchpoint and actions they took, leading to deeper connections.

With data easily accessible from one point, your teams can collaborate better and become more efficient. It also reduces time wasted, giving you more time to grow the organization, find new donors, nurture them, and advance your mission.

About Cazoomi

Cazoomi allows non-profit marketers to integrate critical everyday data through our SyncApps integration platform. Integrate CRM, Marketing Automation, Financials, and Support software to the software you use today.

We offer more than 150+ integrations and help you set up, explore your options, and guide you through usage. SyncApps by Cazoomi enables non-profit organizations to deploy software as a service for their Financials, handle Support, CRM, and Marketing integration with ease and at a price point built for any organization.

For more information, visit https://www.cazoomi.com/